December Meetup - Betterment's Flutter Migration

NOTE: For folks joining virtually, the talks will kick off at 6:30pm ET

This month we are thrilled to be joining forces with our friends from Flutter NYC to present a joint, virtual & in-person hybrid event!

(If you're in NYC and plan to attend in-person, RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/flutter-nyc/events/281824008/ )

Our host for this event is Betterment! They'll be presenting two amazing talks from their mobile team on their recent transition to Flutter from native:

A Tale of T̶w̶o̶ ̶C̶i̶t̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶ Three Platforms: How Flutter Transformed our Organization, by Jeremy Feld

Entering 2020, Betterment was increasingly focused on their mobile applications. The goal was to be able to iterate faster and provide a feature-rich and delightful mobile experience. To help make this mobile-first strategy a reality, Betterment piloted and ultimately adopted Flutter as their framework of choice. Jeremy will talk about the challenges that come with adopting Flutter at the individual and organization levels, as well as the benefits that Betterment has seen as a result of replatforming.

Jeremy Feld is an engineering manager on the mobile team at Betterment. After 4 years of practicing law, he decided he wanted to enjoy what he did, so he started making iOS apps! He previously worked at Snaps and Kabbage, and when he’s not at the Betterment office, you can find him rambling to his 4 year old son and 2 year old daughter about the benefits of cross-platform development in Flutter.

The Incremental Flutter Migration: Replacing our Native Apps with the Strangler Fig Pattern, by Will Lockwood

Flutter is a force-multiplier for individual developers and entire companies to build large feature sets quickly and responsibly. But when a company with existing native applications wants to transition to Flutter for feature development, they face a tough choice: whether to rebuild the product as a greenfield Flutter app, or to iteratively migrate features to Flutter within the existing native apps? Here, we'll discuss how Betterment built an architecture supporting an iterative-replacement migration, the Flutter embedding API/how to use it to host Flutter experiences within native apps, and the engineering principles and strategies that support safe and efficient refactors of large-scale legacy code systems.

Will Lockwood is a software engineer developing cross-platform apps at Betterment. After starting at Betterment as an Android engineer, he helped plan and execute the migration and replacement of Betterment’s native mobile application code to Flutter. Having witnessed the positive impacts this technical migration has had on the user experience, the developer experience, and the product roadmap, he's now focused on maximizing those ongoing benefits at Betterment, and showing others how they can do the same.